July 27, 2004

Toshiba and its partners yesterday raised the tempo in the battle to determine the next-generation DVD format, saying they were on track to launch next year a DVD recorder capable of storing more than eight hours of high-resolution content on one disc (around 27GB for single-layer and 54GB for dual-layer discs).

Microsoft’s Japanese unit, meanwhile, said the company’s next Windows-based operating system, called Longhorn, would be compatible with HD-DVD.… read more

July 27, 2004

Infineon Technologies AG and German clothing manufacturer rosner GmbH & Co. have jointly developed a men’s jacket, known as mp3blue, that contains built-in mobile telephony via Bluetooth and an MP3 player. A textile keyboard on the sleeve controls the electronic features.

When the wearer of the jacket places a telephone call, the stereo system becomes a headset and the music is automatically interrupted when calls come in.

July 26, 2004

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades, says SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak.

He based his prediction on the Drake formula for the likelihood of alien civilizations existing, combined with estimates of the time necessary for this observational task, based on the capabilities of planned radio telescopes.

July 23, 2004

A UCLA team succeeded in flipping a single electron spin upside down in an ordinary commercial integrated circut chip for the first time, and in detecting that the current changes when the electron flips.

“Our research demonstrates that an ordinary transistor can be adapted for practical quantum computing,” said UCLA professor of physics Hong Wen Jiang.

They flipped the spin of the electron by changing a microwave radio… read more

July 23, 2004

Dartmouth College computer scientist Hany Farid has developed algorithms that detect photographs that have been digitally tweaked by combining and editing images.

The technique uses “nearest-neighbor” and other techniques to detect alterations.

“Digital watermarking” (embedding identifying pixels in an digital photo), a technique to indicate an original photo has been altered, can now be automatically inserted in digital photos by some cameras.

July 21, 2004

General human intelligence appears to be based on the volume of gray matter tissue in certain regions of the brain, UC Irvine College of Medicine researchers have found in the most comprehensive structural brain-scan study of intelligence to date.

Previous research had shown that larger brains are weakly related to higher IQ, but this study is the first to demonstrate that gray matter in specific regions in… read more

July 21, 2004

A metallic carbon nanotube can be made into a semiconductor and vice versa via the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Semiconductor nanotubes would allow for building nanoscale computers.

The Aharonov-Bohm effect is a quantum phenomenon in which the wavefunction of an electron acquires a phase shift as it follows a trajectory that encloses a magnetic flux (such as the path round the surface of a cylinder in a magnetic field). This phase… read more